Words matter. These are the best Playwrights Quotes from famous people such as Adam Rapp, Wallace Shawn, Katori Hall, Laura Wade, Lajos Egri, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov’s work to modern playwrights’, consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I’ve always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.
I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
From playwrights I had never heard of and performance forms I had never seen to sculpture and painting, I gained immense experience as an actor in National School of Drama (NSD). I discovered what discipline and good taste in the theatre means.
I think more than anything, you should do what you love. If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.
There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn’t be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.
By increasing the size of the keyhole, today’s playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.
I love the theatre and Miller is one of my all-time favourite playwrights. ‘All My Sons’ is a very socialist play, which exposes the lack of empathy that can accompany capitalism when it is left unchecked.
I don’t know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they’re crap.
Playwrights are the most gregarious writers – to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.
I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.
Often, directors toss playwrights out of rehearsals.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
I’m not one of those playwrights who says, ‘Show up, hit your marks, and don’t talk to me!’ I always want to hear from the other artists involved, whether it’s the director, the lighting tech, or the actors.
I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
As far as dramas are concerned, it’s considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.
We need theatre that is contemporary, lively and relevant, and the only way to do that is to take care of our playwrights and produce their plays.
Playwrights are naturally wary and protective – God, who’s more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.
A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don’t consider it a career at all.
Beckett was the most thorough of playwrights. He tells you what to do and if you’ve any humility at all, you’ll take his advice.
‘American Playhouse’ is very supportive of writers. That’s really why writers like to write for ‘American Playhouse’ for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We’re treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.
There are always leading characters. There are always complex characters; there are very rewarding plays with great directors and tremendous playwrights, yeah. I’ve done a lot of things with theater that I’m very, very proud of.
I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don’t really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can’t make them.
Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
My generation of playwrights have grown up writing for studio theatres, and so the task of writing for more than ten or so actors is a huge challenge. Logistically, it’s like doing an enormous Sudoku. Making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time in the right order instantly sends me into a cold sweat.
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
I’m inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I’m good at it.
When I was in school, I didn’t get exposed to Latino playwrights.
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, ‘Yes, we’d love that.’
